Brothers

Eddie Van Halen was born in 1955 in Amsterdam, Netherlands. At age six, he immigrated to the United States with his family. Because Alex and Eddie’s father was an accomplished jazz musician, the Van Halen brothers understood from a young age what becoming a professional musician required. Both siblings won classical piano contests as children, but both preferred to play rock ‘n’ roll. Originally, Eddie started playing drums and Alex played guitar, but when they discovered that “Ed was a guitar virtuoso,” they switched instruments (24). After playing in bands as a child and teenager, Eddie joined his brother and singer David Lee Roth to form Van Halen, a band that became popular on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood in the mid-1970s, thanks largely to Eddie’s unprecedented skill as a guitarist.

In 1977, Van Halen signed a record deal with Warner Bros., recording five studio albums and touring constantly over the next five years. As they steadily rose to become one the best-selling and most famous bands in the world in the early-1980s, Eddie was regularly recognized as one of the greatest rock guitarists in history. Beginning with the band’s 1984 album, titled 1984, he began playing keyboards as well, most famously on the band’s only number one hit “Jump.”

Later in life, Eddie developed tongue cancer and throat cancer. He died in 2020 at age 65. Although Alex Van Halen chronicles some of Eddie’s more dangerous and self-destructive behaviors, his memoir primarily pays tribute to Eddie as a consummate musician who did his best to compose and play in an uncompromising fashion.

David Lee Roth was born in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1954 and moved to Pasadena, California, as a teenager. In New York City’s Greenwich Village, Roth’s uncle was the founder and owner of Café Wha?, a club that regularly featured famous folk musicians, comedians, and poets in the 1960s, and which likely had a major influence on Roth’s showmanship, flamboyance, and quest for fame. In the early 1970s, Roth was the singer for Red Ball Jet, a band in Pasadena, before befriending Alex and Eddie Van Halen and joining their band, which eventually became Van Halen.

While their musical tastes were quite different—Roth was influenced by soul and R&B musicians such as Al Jolson, Louis Prima, and James Brown, while the Van Halen brothers looked up to rock bands such as Cream and Led Zeppelin—the Van Halens recognized Roth’s charisma and flamboyance as something that could help the stage-facing part of their act: “Dave with his ego and charisma would give us more space to be who we really were. The audience could watch Dave while they listened to us play. He knew that was his role, and he liked it” (53).

After recording six studio albums with Van Halen and completing several world tours, Roth decided to leave Van Halen in 1985. Roth released a solo album, and wrote a memoir and a screenplay, though his film deal eventually fell through. In Brothers, Alex Van Halen reveals that Ted Templeman, the Warner Bros. executive who signed the band, was originally was unhappy with Roth’s singing and wanted the band to replace him with Sammy Hagar, but the band refused.

Bassist Michael Anthony Sobolewski (who uses the stage name Michael Anthony) was born in Chicago in 1954, but moved to Arcadia, California, in 1966. Anthony joined the Van Halen brothers and Roth to form the band’s original lineup in 1974. According to Alex Van Halen, the brothers met Anthony at a gig: When their own PA blew up, Anthony, the lead singer for a different band, let them borrow his. When Anthony agreed to jam with the band, they were more struck by his singing rather than his sound on the bass guitar: “his falsetto enabled something that became important to the Van Halen sound: harmonies” (68).

Alex and Eddie Van Halen’s father Jan was a Dutch American saxophonist and clarinetist who played in orchestras and jazz groups all over Europe; during World War II, Jan served in the marching band of the Dutch air force. After the Van Halens immigrated to the United States in 1962, Jan worked in a machine shop and as a janitor while still continuing to perform as a professional jazz musician. Jan took his sons along to his gigs starting when they were very young, so they gained an intimate knowledge of the music business.

While Jan had a strong influence on his children and their desire to become professional musicians, he also influenced their alcohol use: Alex Van Halen notes that “alcohol was definitely a problem in our family” (34). After Jan’s death in 1986, “alcohol became more fraught and complicated than ever for me. On the one hand, I’m sad and maybe even angry that my dad basically drank himself to death. Suddenly alcohol is revealing itself as this poison, this thing that can kill you, kill your father, ruin your life. On the other hand, drinking is what me and my dad did together” (199-200).

Ted Templeman is a record producer and Warner Bros. executive. In 1977, Templeman saw Van Halen perform at the Starwood and signed them to a record contract within a week. Templeman has stated that “when Van Halen came onstage, it was like they were shot out of a cannon. Their energy wowed me” (93). Templeman produced each of Van Halen’s first six studio albums, as well as David Lee Roth’s solo record.

Noel Monk was Van Halen’s road manager and later full-time band manager. Monk was with the band during their first few tours. Following their first world tour, the band became dissatisfied with and fired their first manager, and promoted Monk. Some of Alex Van Halen’s memoir responds to the memoir Monk published about his experiences with the band, Runnin' with the Devil (2017). In particular, while Monk considers the destructive behavior of Van Halen on tour evidence of fame warping their sense of morality, Alex counters that it was more attributable to the bad judgment of immature young people.

Valerie Bertinelli is an television actress who is best known for portraying Barbara Cooper on the award-winning sitcom One Day at a Time (1974–1985), the drama Touched by an Angel (2001–2003), and the sitcom Hot in Cleveland (2010-2015). In 1981, Bertinelli married Van Halen guitarist Eddie Van Halen. Her marriage to Eddie caused conflict within the band because of her fame. According to Alex Van Halen, singer David Lee Roth was bothered and jealous of the relationship because “there was this new celebrity energy around that had nothing to do with him” (174).

Stine Schyberg is the third and current wife of Alex Van Halen. The couple met in the 1990s while she was working as an art director for Warner Bros. and he was a musician on the label. Alex Van Halen credits her with saving his life by leaving him because of his drug use in 1995: Losing Stine was “the only price I wasn’t willing to pay for the drug” (187).